ABSTRACT
The use of music to divert the demented Emperor Justin II owes nothing to the Boethian tradition, and is an isolated example in the surviving evidence of the period. Certainly the medical writings of Justin's time give no space to it. In the 'sub-Roman' medicine of the early Middle Ages, the complex disease aetiology of Galenic medicine largely disappeared. The Christian Church in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages did not some extremists apart find Hippocratic-Galenic medicine uncongenial. But there were certainly some Fathers who doubted the medicinal power of music, as the Bible represented it. The conceptual framework that had encouraged music therapy was lost, or perhaps even dismantled. Medicine recovers its philosophical underpinning; university medical faculties burgeon; and learned therapeutics become very much in demand, therapeutics in which music therapy has once again a conceptual niche as a means of moderating the 'passions of the soul'.
